AMERICANS ARE BRUSHING UP on Afghanistan, Islam, anthrax, the capabilities of precision-guided weapons, and a score of related subjects–notable among them our old adversary Iraq. Anyone looking for current information on that singularly forbidding country should know about the Iraq Report, updated weekly, courtesy of the U.S. government. It’s a byproduct of Radio Free Iraq, created by Congress three years ago to broadcast Iraqi and regional news into Saddam Hussein’s police state.
Call it a news sampler, though one drawn from problematic sources, the only kind there are: the government in Baghdad; defectors from the government in Baghdad; Kurdish and other opposition groups; newspapers, radio, and satellite TV in the region; the Iraqi press abroad including two London papers, one Saudi-backed, the other associated with the opposition Iraqi National Congress (INC); and Western news services. All this information, gathered by the staff of Radio Free Iraq, is sifted and winnowed, cross-checked to the extent possible and summarized by a regional expert–a Columbia Ph.D. named David Nissman, who has a working knowledge or better of Arabic, Kurdish, Turkish, Persian, Tajik, Russian, German, French, and more, who has lived and worked in Cairo and maintains extensive contacts with Iraqis in the diaspora.
Nissman’s items are then organized and edited by Paul Goble, director of publications for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. At the time of the unraveling of the Soviet Union, Goble was the only person in the U.S. government working full-time on the non-Russian peoples of the USSR. Their report gives priority to items Iraq watchers need to be aware of and to those Nissman and his editor think credible. Says Goble, “David and I have a permanent conversation.”
Last week’s Iraq Report contained 13 items. Here’s the gist of a few of them:
-A release by the INC opposition alliance links Osama bin Laden’s network with Iraq. It claims that a group of Baghdad intelligence officials led by Faruq Hijazi met with bin Laden in Kandahar in December 1998. Hijazi, now Iraq’s ambassador to Turkey, is a former head of foreign covert operations for Saddam’s secret police. The INC also claims that hijacker Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague.
-A top official from Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq met with Turkish officials in Ankara about recent clashes between Kurdish troops and Islamic radicals. Skeptical, a Turkish official–and the Turkish press–accused the Kurds of trying to grab the international spotlight while Islamic terrorism is hot.
-Russian reporters quote the general manager of a power plant near Basra as saying the renovation of the plant by the Russian firm Mosenergomontazh, with 82 Russian workers, will be complete in the spring of 2002, adding capacity of 22 megawatts.
-The Associated Press reports on Saddam’s “Jerusalem Army,” a collection of 7 million volunteer soldiers–men, women, and children–who he says are ready to march off to liberate Palestine. Arab and Western analysts consider the army “a prop in the fantasy drama staged by Saddam to make him a hero” in the Arab world.
-A former senior scientist of the Iraqi regime, physicist and recent defector Dr. Al-Sabrini (a pseudonym), told London’s Daily Telegraph (Sept. 30) that, though Saddam has shelved his nuclear program as too expensive, he has 3,000 chemists and physicists working to develop and weaponize toxins. The substances were tested on Iraqi prisoners in Radwaniyah Prison. Senior Western intelligence officers confirm experimentation on prisoners.
And so on. Even after the writer and editor’s vetting, the reader must judge for himself what weight to give each of these assertions. The non-expert is left with something short of certainty–but also something more valuable than prejudice or propaganda. Perusing the Iraq Report for even a few minutes every week, one acquires bit by bit an enhanced and sober sense of the forces at play in a treacherous place that is unavoidably consequential for Americans.
Claudia Winkler is a managing editor at The Weekly Standard.
